Abstract

Stem cell systems are highly complex and dynamic, and consist of large numbers of different cells expressing many molecules. Despite intensive research, many long-standing questions in stem cell research remain disputed. One major reason is the fact that we usually only analyze populations of cells - rather than individual cells - at very few time points of an experiment. Tracking of individual cells would be an extremely powerful approach to improve our understanding of molecular cell fate control. We are therefore developing imaging systems to follow the fate of individual cells over many generations. We program new software to help recording and displaying the divisional history, position, properties, interaction, etc. of all individual cells over many generations. Our approaches also allow continuous long-term quantification of protein expression or activity in individual living cells. The resulting novel kind of continuous quantitative single cell data is used for the generation of improved models describing the molecular control of stem cell fates. I will discuss how we try to find answers for long standing questions in stem cell research.